Keira’s Kiss. The Affordance of “Kissability” in the Film Experience

PAGE PROOFS (please see Projections for finished article): Murray Smith's book "Film, Art, and the Third Culture" makes a significant contribution to cognitive film theory and philosophical aesthetics, expanding the conceptual tools of film analysis to include perspectives from neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. Smith probes assumptions about how cinema affects spectators by examining aspects of experience and neurophysiological responses that are unavailable to conscious, systematic reflection on experience and aesthetic techniques. This article interrogates Smith's account of emotion, empathy, and imagination in cinematic representation and film spectatorship, placing his work in dialogue with other recent interventions in the fields of cinema studies and embodied cognition. Smith's contribution to understanding the role of emotion in screen studies is vital, and when read in conjunction with recent publications by Carl Plantinga and Mark Johnson on ethical engagement and the moral imagination, this new work constitutes a notable advance in film theory.

International journal of education and humanities, 2022

This paper investigates how interdisciplinary research impacts the film industry in research and practice by introducing psychological concepts. Psychology, especially neural and cognitive science, provides a distinct advantage when examining humans' audiovisual processing mechanisms and esthetics questions regarding the film. By introducing psychology, film researchers and filmmakers could rethink and evaluate the current research paradigm from a broader point of view. This paper consists of three parts: (1) a discussion on the nature of film using an interdisciplinary approach; (2) a discussion on the characteristics and attributes of film; (3) an introduction of the psychological concept of "affordance" to film studies and practice. Although the film interdisciplinary research paradigm is still under development, we argue that introducing the other subjects is innovating the field of film research, providing us with a new angle to examine the intersections of ubiquitous but complex human esthetics activities.

2012

The vivid and engaging nature of the audiovisual experience, particularly in character-driven narrative films, is specifically functional to the creation of a relationship between the spectator and the world of the film based on the perception of observed intentional actions. This essay explores the idea that the film spectator experiences a tangible relationship with the filmic objects, subjects, and environments by simulating the character’s actions and bodily postures. The hypothesis is evaluated in a theoretical neurophenomenological framework, with the aim of rethinking film spectatorship in the light of a perspective created by combining the results of neurocognitive and neurophysiological experiments with a phenomenological interpretation of the human experience.

Projections, 2022

In the last decades, the contribution of cognitive neuroscience to fi lm studies has been invested in at least three diff erent lines of research. The fi rst one has to do with fi lm theory and history: the new attention, inspired by cognitive neuroscience, to the viewer's brain-body, the sensorimotor basis of fi lm cognition, and the forms of embodied simulation elicited by the cinematic experience has stimulated a profound rethinking of a relevant part of the theoretical discourse on cinema, from the very beginning of the twentieth century to the most recent refl ections within cognitive fi lm studies and the phenomenology of fi lm. The second line has to do with the intersubjective relationship between the movie-its style, rhythm, characters, and narrative-and the viewer, and it is characterized by an empirical approach that yields very interesting results, useful for rethinking and problematizing our ideas about editing, camera movements, and fi lm reception. The third line concerns a possible experimental approach to the new life of fi lm, focusing on the digital image, the innovative forms of technological mediation, and the inscription of a new fi lm spectatorship within a completely diff erent medial frame. The goal of this special issue is to off er insights across these lines of research.

MIT Press: Embodiment, Enaction, and Culture, 2017

In the first section of this chapter we will review different approaches to the ways that we cognitively engage with film (e.g. by highlighting certain neural responses to different filmic means; means that include the use of cuts, and of different camera and lens movements to portray scenes) and provide a basic embodied interpretation of recent research in this area. In the second section we will address philosophical claims regarding our embodied engagement with film stemming from phenomenological film theory and will provide an initial taxonomy of the roles visual cultural artifacts play in 4EA approaches to the mind. In the third section, we will focus on a more positive claim, namely that familiarization with the filmic medium might change our experience of film as well as our extra filmic perceptual routines over time, a process that has led to the emergence of a filmic body. Cognitive film theory, as portrayed in the first section of this chapter, considers certain filmic techniques to be closer to our preexisting bodily habits than others, and it is because of this vicinity to our natural perceptual routines that such techniques succeed in creating seemingly more realistic situations (e.g. by engaging certain motor components of the brain), or so they argue. We will entertain a thought that stands in opposition to this, namely that we entertain a filmic body in the movie context that adheres to its own rules. When we therefore engage with the medium in bodily terms (in order to have an illusory experience and immerse ourselves in its narrative), this engagement is not simply premised on what could be called our natural body (i.e. a fixed set-up of perceptual mechanism), but on novel skills and habits of perceiving that we have developed through our exposure to the conditions and syntax of film.

PsycCRITIQUES, 2013

4 through an engagement with the functions of our biological bodies. We are built to sensually and multisensoriously interact with our environments, whether those environments are immediate or are (im)mediated by a screen, and so I will go beyond the invocation of scientific terminology, where most theory stops, to consider the kinesthetic and proprioceptive elements of embodied affect in their bio-logical basis within our perceiving bodies and how memory works to bridge cognition and viscerality while itself being integral to the structures of cinema. The films I delve into all contrive to teach us new visual languages viscerally, and in so doing they manipulate the experience of temporality central to our sensorium and equally inherent to the apparatus of the moving image, exemplifying how, 'visual culture manifests […] "multi-temporal heterogeneity", i.e. the simultaneous, superimposed spatio-temporalities which characterize the contemporary social text'. 5 And so I will conclude with a consideration of the predominance of temporal 'tricks' in today's cinema -which precisely serve to reflect and reflect upon these simultaneous superimpositions of spatio-temporalities -as a convergence of the self-reflexivity, interactivity, immediacy and memory which together evoke our viscerality as spectators and as bio-logically (em)bodied beings.

Discourse, 2008

It's the sense of touch. In any real city, you walk, you know? You brush past people, people bump into you. In L.A., nobody touches you. We're always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something.